Black Sea

Synopsis: After being made redundant from his salvage job, former naval officer and submarine captain, Robinson (Jude Law), learns about a sunken Nazi U-boat rumoured to contain a fortune in Russian gold. With funding from a shady millionaire, Robinson assembles a misfit crew made up of half Russian and half English unemployed submariners who are desperate enough to take on the illegal mission.

Submarine films usually build on the mythic dangers of life below the sea, taking the vessel's unnatural vulnerabilities and the cramped conditions with their inherent capacity for stretched nerves and combining these with some kind of specific threat or crisis such as deadly engagement with the enemy as in Run Silent, Run Deep (1958) or a nail-biting game of nuclear brinkmanship as in Crimson Tide. Most critically there is a clash of wills between conflicting points of view on board. The result is an atmosphere of escalating tension and high drama.

Kevin Macdonald’s Black Sea taps into all this with a story which although having the familiar war-setting as an historical backdrop has its roots in a more contemporary malaise (the film feels like it is set in the 1980s) -  the devestating unemployment in Britain’s industrial North.

After Jude Law’s Robinson is laid off by the salvage company for which has worked for the past 11 years (so devotedly that his wife left him, taking their son) he repairs to the pub where with similarly-situated mates he hears about a WW2 U-Boat carrying millions of dollars of gold bullion lying in relatively shallow waters that are the subject of a dispute between Georgia and Russia. Before you can can say “Captain Nemo”, Robinson has put together a half-Russian half-British crew, refurbished an old sub and is a hundred metres away from the booty.

This is where the guts of the film kicks in as Robinson, who has opted to give each member of the crew, himself included, an equal share of the loot has to impose his will on this group of misfits. Soon the idea that fewer crew members means a larger share for the survivors takes hold and the Brits and the Ruskis are eye-ing each other with a view to elimination. This is a potentially-rewarding set-up but it is also where the film falls down somewhat as the drama depends entirely on one of the characters, Fraser (Ben Mendelsohn) who acts in such as way as to destabilize the situation not once but twice.  The problem is that not only do his actions seem irrational (we are pointedly told at the outset that he is a psychopath, but if of this order why did Robinson hire him?), but they are not consistent with his character as played or even how he is treated throughout the film by the rest of the crew. This must be in part the fault of writer Dennis Kelly and in part that of Mendelsohn but ultimately it is Macdonald’s and it devalues the film: Fraser is too obviously devised to keep the drama primed.

On the other hand Law, an actor I’ve never had much time for, does a sterling job as the man who has to keep this ramshackle, dangerous mission on track.  His character is rounded out, perhaps a little too sentimentally, with the story of his sense of failure and having been wronged by life.  It gives him the kind of when-you-ain’t-got-nothing-to-lose focus which enables him to command obedience from his crew. In the latter stages it also introduces an interesting twist to his character.  But Law's performance  also makes apparent how much better an actor he is than Mendelsohn.

Although there is not a lot of the usual procedural stuff on display Macdonald does a good job with creating the atmosphere and tension that are essential to the submarine genre and whilst there are evident shortcomings Black Sea is still a worthy addition to the category.
 

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